President Nixon's staff conspired to cover up the break-in. As
evidence mounted against the president's staff, which included
former staff members testifying against them in an investigation
conducted by the Senate
Watergate Committee, it was revealed that President Nixon had a
tape recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations.Recordings from
these tapes implicated the president, revealing that he had
attempted to cover up the break-in. After a series of court battles, the
U.S.Supreme Court ruled that the president had to hand over the
tapes; he ultimately complied.

Break-in

On June 17, 1972, Frank
Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape
covering the latch on locks on several doors in the complex
(leaving the doors unlocked). He took the tape off, and thought
nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had
retaped the locks. Willis called the police and five men were
arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's (DNC)
office.The five men were Virgilio
González, Bernard Barker,
James W.McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis. The five were charged with
attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and
other communications. On September 15, a grand jury indicted them and two other men
(E.Howard Hunt,
Jr. and G.Gordon Liddy) for conspiracy, burglary, and
violation of federal wiretapping laws.

The men who broke into the office were tried and convicted on
January 30, 1973. After much
investigation, all five men were directly or indirectly tied to the
1972 Committee to
Re-elect the President (CRP, or sometimes pejoratively referred
to as CREEP) and the trial judge, John
J.Sirica, suspected a conspiracy
involving higher-echelon government officials.In March 1973, James
McCord wrote a letter to Sirica, claiming that he was under
political pressure to plead guilty and he implicated high-ranking
government officials, including former Attorney General John Mitchell. His letter helped to elevate
the affair into a more prominent political scandal.

Investigation

The unraveling of the coverup began in the immediate aftermath of
the arrests, the search of the burglars' hotel rooms, and a
background investigation of the initial evidence, most prominently
thousands of dollars in cash in their possession at the time of
arrest. On June 19, 1972 it was publicly
revealed that one of the Watergate burglars was a GOP security
aide. Former Attorney General John
Mitchell, who at the time was the head of the Nixon re-election
campaign, denied any involvement with the Watergate break-in or
knowing the five burglars. On August 1, a
$25,000 cashiers check earmarked for the Nixon re-election
campaign, was found in the bank account of one of the Watergate
burglars. Further investigation would reveal accounts showing that
still more thousands had passed through their bank and credit card
accounts, supporting their travel, living expenses, and purchases,
in the months leading up to their arrests. Examination of the
burglars' accounts showed the link to the 1972 Committee to
Re-Elect the President, through its subordinate finance
committee.

Several individual donations (totaling $89,000) were made by
individuals who thought they were making private donations to the
President's re-election committee. The donations were made in the
form of cashier's, certified, and personal checks, and all were
made payable only to the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
Investigative examination of the bank records of a Miami company
run by Watergate burglar Bernard
Barker revealed that an account controlled by him personally
had deposited, and had transferred to it (through the Federal
Reserve Check Clearing System) the funds from these financial
instruments.

The banks that had originated the checks (especially the certified
and cashier's checks) were keen to ensure that the depository
institution used by Bernard Barker had acted properly to protect
their (the correspondent banks') fiduciary interest in ensuring
that the checks had been properly received and endorsed by the
check’s payee, prior to its acceptance for deposit in Bernard
Barker's account. Only in this way would the correspondent banks,
which had issued the checks on behalf of the individual donors, not
be held liable for the un-authorized and improper release of funds
from their customer’s accounts into the account of Bernard
Barker.

The investigative finding, which cleared Bernard Barker’s bank of
fiduciary malfeasance, led to the direct implication of members of
the Committee to Re-Elect the President, to whom the checks had
been delivered. Those individuals were the Committee Bookkeeper and
its Treasurer, Hugh Sloan.

The Committee, as an organization, followed normal business
accounting standards in allowing only duly authorized individual(s)
to accept and endorse on behalf of the Committee any financial
instrument created on the Committee’s behalf by itself, or by
others. Therefore, no financial institution would accept or process
a check on behalf of the Committee unless it had been endorsed and
verified as endorsed by a duly authorized individual(s). On the
checks themselves deposited into Bernard Barker’s bank account was
the endorsement of Committee Treasurer Hugh
Sloan who was duly authorized and designated to endorse such
instruments that were prepared (by others) on behalf of the
Committee.

But once Sloan had endorsed a check made payable to the Committee,
he had a legal and fiduciary responsibility to see that the check
was deposited into the account(s) which were named on the check,
and for which he had been delegated fiduciary responsibility. Sloan
failed to do that. He was confronted and faced the potential charge
of federal bank fraud; he revealed that he had given the checks to
G.Gordon
Liddy and was directed by Committee Deputy Director Jeb Magruder and Finance Director Maurice Stans
to do so.

On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while
serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund
used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On
October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part
of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of
the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign. Yet on
November 7, Nixon was re-elected
president in one of the biggest landslide re-election campaigns
ever in American political history.

Barker had been given the checks by Liddy in an attempt to avoid
direct proof that Barker ever had received funds from the
organization. Barker had attempted to disguise the origin of the
funds by depositing the donor’s checks into bank accounts which
(though controlled by him), were located in banks outside of the
United States. What Barker, Liddy, and Sloan did not know was that
the complete record of all such transactions are held, after the
funds cleared, for roughly six months. Barker’s use of foreign
banks to deposit checks and withdraw the funds via cashier’s checks
and money orders in April and May 1972 guaranteed that the banks
would keep the entire transaction record at least until October and
November 1972.

The connection between the break-in and the re-election campaign
committee was highlighted by media coverage. In particular,
investigative coverage by Time, The New York Times, and especially
The Washington Post,
fueled focus on the event. The coverage dramatically increased
publicity and consequent political repercussions. Relying heavily
upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of
the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the
Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House.
Chief among the Post's anonymous sources was an individual
they had nicknamed Deep Throat (who was
later revealed in 2005 to be former Deputy Director of the FBI
William Mark Felt, Sr.) It
was Deep Throat who met secretly with Woodward, and told him of
Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the
rest of the White House staff regarded the stake in Watergate
extremely high. Deep Throat also warned Woodward that the FBI
wanted to know where he and the other reporters were getting the
information which was uncovering even a wider web of crimes than
first disclosed. In one of their last meetings, all of which took
place at an underground parking garage somwhere in Washington DC at
2:00 AM, Deep Throat cautioned Woodward that he might be followed
and not to trust their phone conversations.

Rather than ending with the trial and conviction of the burglars,
the investigations grew broader; a Senate committee chaired by
Senator Sam Ervin was set up to examine
Watergate and began issuing subpoenas to
White House staff members.

On April 30, 1973, Nixon was forced to ask for the resignation of
two of his most influential aides, H.R.Haldeman and John
Ehrlichman, both of whom were indicted and ultimately went to
prison. He also fired White House
CounselJohn Dean, who had just
testified before the Senate and went on to become the key witness
against President Nixon.

The President announced these resignations in an address to the
American people:

"In one of the most difficult decisions of my
Presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest
associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, two
of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.
Because Attorney General Kleindienst, though a distinguished public
servant, my personal friend for 20 years, with no personal
involvement whatever in this matter has been a close personal and
professional associate of some of those who are involved in this
case, he and I both felt that it was also necessary to name a new
Attorney General. The Counsel to the President, John Dean, has also
resigned."-Richard Nixon

On the
same day, Nixon appointed a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority
to designate, for the Watergate inquiry, a special counsel who
would be independent of the regular Justice
Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named
Archibald Cox to the position.

Tapes

The hearings held by the Senate Committee, in which Dean and other
former administration officials delivered testimony, were broadcast
from May 17 to August 7, 1973, causing political damage to the
President. Each network maintained coverage of the hearings every
third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with
NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans
with television sets tuned in to at
least one portion of the hearings.

On July 13, 1973, Donald Sanders, the
Deputy Minority Counsel, asked Alexander Butterfield if there were
any type of recording systems in the White House. Butterfield answered
that, though he was reluctant to say so, there was a system in the
White House that automatically recorded everything in the Oval Office and other rooms in the White House,
including the Cabinet
Room and Nixon's private office in the Old Executive
Office Building. Later, Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield if he was
"aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval
Office of the president?" The shocking revelation transformed the
Watergate investigation yet again. The tapes were soon subpoenaed
by Cox and then by the Senate. Nixon refused to release them,
citing his executive privilege
as President of the United States, and ordered Cox to drop his
subpoena. Cox refused.

A taped conversation that was crucial to the case against President
Nixon took place between the President and his counsel, John Dean,
on March 21st 1973. In this conversation, Dean summarizes many
aspects of the Watergate case, and then focuses on the subsequent
coverup, describing it as a "cancer on the presidency". The
burglary team was being paid hush money
for their silence and Dean states: "that's the most troublesome
post-thing, because Bob [Haldeman] is involved in that; John
[Ehrlichman] is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell
is involved in that. And that's an obstruction of justice." Dean
continues and states that Howard Hunt is blackmailing the White
House, demanding money immediately, and President Nixon states that
the blackmail money should be paid: "...just looking at the
immediate problem, don't you have to have -- handle Hunt's
financial situation damn soon? [...] you've got to keep the cap on
the bottle that much, in order to have any options." At the time of
the initial congressional impeachment debate on Watergate, it was
not known that Nixon had known and approved of the payments to the
Watergate defendents much earlier than this conversation. Among
later released recordings, Nixon's conversation with Haldeman on
August 1st, 1972 is one of several tapes that establishes this.
Nixon states: "Well...they have to be paid. That's all there is to
that. They have to be paid" During congressional debate on
impeachment, those who believed that impeachment required a
criminally indictable offense focused their attention on President
Nixon's agreement to make the blackmail payments, regarding this as
an affirmative act to obstruct justice as a member of the cover-up
conspiracy.

"Saturday Night Massacre"

Cox's refusal to drop his subpoena influenced Nixon to demand the
resignations of Richardson and deputy William Ruckelshaus, on October 20,
1973, in a search of someone in the Justice Department willing to
fire Cox. This search ended with Solicitor GeneralRobert Bork. Though Bork believed Nixon's order
to be valid and appropriate, he considered resigning to avoid being
"perceived as a man who did the President's bidding to save my
job." However, both Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him not to
resign, in order to prevent any further damage to the Justice
Department. As the new acting department head, Bork carried out the
presidential order and dismissed the special prosecutor.
Allegations of wrongdoing prompted Nixon to famously state "I'm not
a crook" in front of 400 Associated
Press managing editors on November 17, 1973.

Nixon was forced, however, to allow the appointment of a new
special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who
continued the investigation. While Nixon continued to refuse to
turn over actual tapes, he agreed to release transcripts of a large
number of them; Nixon cited the fact that any audio pertinent to
national security information could be redacted from the released tapes.

The audio tapes caused further controversy on December 7, when an
18½ minute
portion of one tape was found to have been erased. Nixon's
personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods,
said she had accidentally erased the tape by pushing the wrong foot
pedal on her tape player while answering the phone. However, as
photos all over the press showed, it was unlikely for Woods to
answer the phone and keep her foot on the pedal. Later forensic
analysis determined that the tape had been erased in several
segments — at least five, and perhaps as many as nine.

Supreme Court

The issue of access to the tapes went to the Supreme Court. On July
24, 1974, in United States
v.Nixon,
the Court, which did not include the recused Justice William Rehnquist, ruled unanimously that
claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void, and they
ordered the president to give them to the special prosecutor. On
July 30, 1974, President Nixon complied with the order and released
the subpoenaed tapes.

Final investigations and resignation

Nixon's resignation letter, August 9,
1974

On March 1, 1974, former aides to the president, known as the
"Watergate Seven" — Haldeman,
Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Charles Colson,
Gordon C.Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson — were indicted for
conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury
also secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. John
Dean, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and
other figures had already pleaded guilty. On April 5, 1974, former
Nixon appointments secretary Dwight
Chapin was convicted of lying to the grand jury. Two days
later, the Watergate grand jury indicted Ed
Reinecke, Republican lieutenant governor of California, on
three charges of perjury before the Senate committee.

The "Smoking Gun" tape

In August 1974, the previously unknown tape from June 23, 1972, was
released. Recorded only a few days after the break-in, it
documented Nixon and Haldeman formulating a plan to block
investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that
national security was involved. Haldeman introduces the topic as
follows: "...the Democratic break-in thing, we're back to the--in
the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because
Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them, and they have, their
investigation is now leading into someproductive areas [...] and it
goes in some directions we don't want it to go." After explaining
how the money from CRP was traced to the burglars, Haldeman
explains the coverup plan: "the way to handle this now is for us to
have Walters [CIA] call Pat Gray [FBI] and just say, 'Stay the hell
out of this ...this is ah, business here we don't want you to go
any further on it.'" President Nixon approves this plan, and is
given more information about the involvement of his campaign in the
break-in, telling Haldeman: "All right, fine, I understand it all.
We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest." Returning to the use
of the CIA to obstruct the FBI, he instructs Haldeman: "You call
them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That's the way they play
it and that's the way we are going to play it."

Prior to the release of this tape, President Nixon had denied
political motivations in his instructions to the CIA, and claimed
he had no knowledge prior to March 21, 1973 of any involvement by
senior campaign officials such as John
Mitchell. The contents of this tape persuaded President Nixon's
own lawyers, Fred Buzhardt and James St. Clair, "The tape proved
that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides,
and to his own lawyers - for more than two years." The tape, which
was referred to as a "smoking gun,"
hampered Nixon politically. The ten congressmen who had voted
against all three articles of impeachment in the committee
announced that they would all support impeachment when the vote was
taken in the full House.

Resignation

Throughout this time, Nixon still denied any involvement in the
ordeal. However, after being told by key Republican Senators that
enough votes existed to remove him, Nixon decided to resign. In a
nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of
August 8, 1974, the president said,

In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I
have always tried to do what was best for the Nation.

Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate,
I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible
effort to complete the term of office to which you elected
me.

In the past few days, however, it has become evident to
me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the
Congress to justify continuing that effort.

As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that
it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its
conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit
of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously
destabilizing precedent for the future....

I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the
personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously
urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come
before any personal considerations. From the discussions I have had
with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because
of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the
Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult
decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the
interests of the Nation would require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is
completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as
President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs
a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at
this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to
fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would
almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President
and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the
great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at
home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon
tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that
hour in this office.

The morning that his resignation was to take effect, President and
Mrs. Nixon and their family bade farewell to the White House staff
in the East Room. A helicopter took him from the White House to
Andrews Air Force base in Maryland.
Nixon later wrote that he remembered thinking "As the helicopter
moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but
of the future. What could I do now?..." At Andrews, he boarded
Air Force One to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California and then to his home in San
Clemente.

Pardon and aftermath

Though President Nixon's resignation prompted Congress to drop the
impeachment proceedings, criminal prosecution was still a
possibility. Nixon was succeeded by Vice
President Gerald Ford, who on September
8, 1974, issued a full and unconditional pardon unto President Nixon, immunizing him from
prosecution for any crimes he had "committed or may have committed
or taken part in" as President. In a televised broadcast to the
nation, Ford explained that he felt the pardon was in the best
interest of the country and that the Nixon family's situation "is
an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go
on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have
concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must."

Nixon proclaimed his innocence until his death in 1994. He did
state in his official response to the pardon that he "was wrong in
not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with
Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial
proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national
tragedy."

The Nixon pardon has been argued to be a factor in President Ford's
loss of the presidential election of 1976. Accusations of a secret
"deal" made with Ford, promising a pardon in return for Nixon's
resignation, led Ford to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on
October 17, 1974.

In his autobiography A Time to Heal, Ford wrote about a
meeting he had with Nixon's Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig. Haig was explaining what he
and Nixon's staff thought were Nixon's only options. He could try
to ride out the impeachment and fight against conviction in the
Senate all the way, or he could resign. His options for resigning
were to delay his resignation until further along in the
impeachment process to try and settle for a censure vote in
Congress, or pardon himself and then resign. Haig then
told Ford that some of Nixon's staff suggested that Nixon could
agree to resign in return for an agreement that Ford would pardon
him.

Haig emphasized that these weren't his
suggestions.

He didn't identify the staff members and he made it
very clear that he wasn't recommending any one option over
another.

What he wanted to know was whether or not my overall
assessment of the situation agreed with his.[emphasis in
original].

.

.

Next he asked if I had any suggestions as to courses of
actions for the President.

I didn't think it would be proper for me to make any
recommendations at all, and I told him so.

Charles Colson pleaded guilty to charges concerning the Daniel Ellsberg case; in
exchange, the indictment against him for covering up the activities
of the Committee to Re-elect the President was dropped, as it was
against Strachan. The remaining five members of the Watergate Seven
indicted in March went on trial in October 1974, and on January 1,
1975, all but Parkinson were found guilty. In 1976, the U.S. Court
of Appeals ordered a new trial for Mardian; subsequently, all
charges against him were dropped. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and
Mitchell exhausted their appeals in 1977. Ehrlichman entered prison
in 1976, followed by the other two in 1977.

The effect on the upcoming Senate election and
House race, only
three months later, was significant. The Democrats gained five
seats in the Senate and 49 in the House. Watergate was also
indirectly responsible for changes in campaign financing. It was a
driving factor in amending the Freedom of
Information Act in 1974, as well as laws requiring new
financial disclosures by key government officials, such as the
Ethics in Government Act.
While not legally required, other types of personal disclosure,
such as releasing recent income tax forms, became expected.
Presidents since Franklin D.Roosevelt had recorded many of
their conversations, but after Watergate this practice purportedly
ended.

The Watergate scandal left such an impression on the national and
international consciousness that many scandals since then have been
labeled with the suffix "-gate".

According to Thomas J. Johnson, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University,
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
boldly predicted during Nixon's final days that history would
remember Nixon as a great president and that Watergate would be
relegated to a "minor footnote."

Since Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were
lawyers, the scandal severely tarnished the public image of the
legal profession. In order to defuse public demand for direct
federal regulation of lawyers (as opposed to leaving it in the
hands of state bar associations or
courts), the American Bar
Association (ABA) launched two major reforms. First, the ABA
decided that its existing
Model Code of Professional Responsibility (promulgated 1969)
was a failure and replaced it with the Model
Rules of Professional Conduct in 1983. The MRPC has been
adopted in part or in whole by 48 states. Its preamble contains an
emphatic reminder to young lawyers that the legal profession can
remain self-governing only if lawyers behave properly. Second, the
ABA promulgated a requirement that law students at ABA-approved
law schools take a course in professional responsibility
(which means they must study the MRPC). The requirement remains in
effect.

Purpose of the break-in

Although the purpose of the break-in of the DNC offices has never
been established, some theories suggest that the burglars were
after specific information. The likeliest of these theories
suggests that the target of the break-in was the offices of
Larry O'Brien, the Chairman of the DNC
. In 1968, O'Brien was appointed by Vice President Hubert Humphrey to serve nationally as the
director of his presidential campaign and by Howard Hughes to serve in Washington as his
public-policy lobbyist. O'Brien was elected in 1968 and 1970 by the
DNC to serve nationally as its chairman. With the upcoming
Presidential election, former Howard Hughes business associate
John H.Meier, working with Hubert Humphrey and
others, wanted to feed misinformation to Richard Nixon. John
Meier's father had been a German agent during World War II. Meier
had joined the FBI and in the 60s had contracted to the CIA to
eliminate Fidel Castro using Mafia bosses Sam Giancana
and Santo Trafficante. In late
1971, the President’s brother, Donald
Nixon, was collecting intelligence for his brother at the time
and was asking Meier about Larry O'Brien. In 1956, Donald Nixon had
borrowed $205,000 from Howard Hughes and never repaid the loan. The
fact of the loan surfaced during the 1960 presidential election
campaign embarrassing Richard Nixon and becoming a real political
liability. According to author Donald M. Bartlett, Richard Nixon
would do all that would be necessary to prevent another
Hughes-Nixon family embarrassment. From 1968 to 1970, Hughes
withdrew nearly half a million dollars from the Texas National Bank
of Commerce for contributions to both Democrats and Republicans,
including presidential candidates Humphrey and Nixon. Hughes wanted
Donald Nixon and Meier involved but Richard Nixon was opposed to
their involvement.

Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the
election because they had considerable information on Richard
Nixon’s illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been
released, and that Larry O’Brien had the information, (O’Brien who
had received $25,000 from Hughes didn’t actually have any documents
but Meier claims to have wanted Richard Nixon to think he did). It
is only a question of conjecture then that Donald called his
brother Richard and told him that Meier gave the Democrats all the
Hughes information that could destroy him and that O’Brien had the
proof. The fact is Larry O'Brien, elected Democratic Party
Chairman, was also a lobbyist for Howard Hughes in a Democratic
controlled Congress and the possibility of his finding about Hughes
illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign was too much of a
danger for Nixon to ignore and O'Brien's office at Watergate became
a target of Nixon's intelligence in the political campaign. This
theory has been proposed as a motivation for the break-in.

Numerous theories have persisted in claiming deeper significance to
the Watergate scandal than that commonly acknowledged by media and
historians:

In the book The Ends of Power, Nixon's chief of staff
H.R.Haldeman claimed that the term
"Bay of Pigs", mentioned by
Nixon in a tape-recorded White House conversation as the reason the
CIA should put a stop to the Watergate investigations, was used by
Nixon as a coded reference to a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro during the John F. Kennedy administration. The CIA had not
disclosed this plot to the Warren
Commission, the commission investigating the Kennedy
assassination, despite the fact that it would attribute a motive
to Castro in the assassination. Any such revelation would
also expose CIA/Mafia connections that could lead to unwanted
scrutiny of suspected CIA/Mafia participants in the assassination
of the president. Furthermore, Nixon's awareness as vice-president
of the Bay of Pigs plan and his own ties to the underworld and
unsavory intelligence operations might come to light. A theoretical
connection between the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate
Tapes was later referred to in the biopic, Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone.

Silent
Coup, a 1991 book by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
argued that it was Nixon's silent war with the Pentagon that ultimately led to his removal from
office.

The book was criticized for apparent leaps of logic and the
citation of weak evidence and its theories are not widely supported
by either professional historians or the general public.

Secret Honor by Stone and
Freed implies that Nixon deliberately sacrificed his presidency to
save democracy from a plan to implement martial law. The theory
uses the construct of "Yankees" vs. "Cowboys" to suggest that,
since the postwar era, the United States has been dominated by
Yankees competing with Cowboys. Nixon, who hailed from the
Southwest, was initially backed by the military industrial defense
contractor power-brokers (the Cowboys); however, he later wanted to
jump ship and return government to the east-coast establishment of
Yankees. His resignation accomplished this because Nelson Rockefeller, the epitome of the
eastern economic elite, assumed the vice presidency after Nixon's
resignation.

Gordon Novel, a man known for
several controversial investigations, has claimed Watergate served
as a discourse to stop the Nixon administration to hold Senate
hearings about a postmortem on the Vietnam war.

References

This book is volume 1 of a two volume set. Both volumes share
the same ISBN and Library of Congress call number, E859 .C62
1973

The evidence was quite simple: there was the voice of the
President on June 23, 1972, directing the CIA to halt an FBI
investigation which would be politically embarrassing to his
re-election, which was an obstruction of justice.

"And the most punishing blow of all was yet to come in late
afternoon when the President received, in his Oval Office, the
Congressional leaders of his party — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott,
John Rhodes. The accounts of all three coincide... Goldwater
averred that there were not more than fifteen votes left in his
support in the Senate...."

"Soon Alexander Haig and James St. Clair learned of the
existence of this tape and they were convinced that it would
guarantee Nixon's impeachment in the House of Representatives and
conviction in the Senate."

"There were still simply too many unanswered questions in the
case. By that time, thinking about the break-in and reading about
it, I'd have had to be some kind of moron to believe that no other
people were involved. No political campaign committee would turn
over so much money to a man like Gordon Liddy without someone
higher up in the organization approving the transaction. How could
I not see that? These questions about the case were on my mind
during a pretrial session in my courtroom December 4."

"When Judge Sirica finished reading the letter, the courtroom
exploded with excitement and reporters ran to the rear entrance to
phone their newspapers. The bailiff kept banging for silence. It
was a stunning development, exactly what I had been waiting for.
Perjury at the trial. The involvement of others. It looked as if
Watergate was about to break wide open."

http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/wspf/886-008.pdf
"TRANSCRIPT PREPARED BY THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY STAFF FOR THE HOUSE
JUDICIARY COMMITTEE OF A RECORDING OF A MEETING AMONG THE
PRESIDENT, JOHN DEAN AND H.R. HALDEMAN ON MARCH 21, 1973 FROM 10:12
TO 11:55 A.M."

http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/wspf/886-008.pdf
"TRANSCRIPT PREPARED BY THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY STAFF FOR THE HOUSE
JUDICIARY COMMITTEE OF A RECORDING OF A MEETING AMONG THE
PRESIDENT, JOHN DEAN AND H.R. HALDEMAN ON MARCH 21, 1973 FROM 10:12
TO 11:55 A.M."

http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/wspf/741-002.pdf
"TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDING OF A MEETING BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT AND
H.R. HALDEMAN IN THE OVAL OFFICE ON JUNE 23, 1972 FROM 10:04 TO
11:39 AM" Watergate Special Prosecution Force